Make Your Data Big with Code
By Eric Stroo, December 1, 2015
Not too long ago, integrating audience engagement tools was an everyday struggle involving Excel wizardry and lots of time. Thankfully, many of the platforms we rely on for digital communications now provide excellent APIs (application programming interfaces), which make applications’ data usable and changeable. You can even connect different services together with a bit of code.
We love hosting great events for our partners. Over time, we have found that Eventbrite is far and away the best tool for staying organized before, during, and after the event. But during the run-up to a recent event, we ran into a challenge.
Before the event, we emailed a beautiful invitation to our partner’s MailChimp subscribers. As the event date got closer, we wanted to send another invitation to the list, but not to the people who had already RSVP’d. To build a new segment in MailChimp, we had to export lists from MailChimp and Eventbrite, and then deduplicate in Excel. The process worked, but it felt dead wrong and took too long.
Thankfully, with MailChimp’s new API and a bit of new code, we were able to connect our list with Eventbrite by writing a simple sync to accomplish four things:
- Get a list of who had registered for the event.
- Compare that list to the partner’s mailing list, and find the records that did not overlap.
- Create two groups in MailChimp for the registrants and non-registrants.
- Update our MailChimp list with any additional data we collected about the list from the Eventbrite form.
The code, which took a few hours to write, accomplishes all four goals in a matter of minutes. And we’ve made it freely available for you to use on your own projects. Now the sky’s the limit.
We are seeing more and more service providers create open APIs that give users the ability to manipulate data for their own projects. Combined with data sources like Quandl and the Sunlight Foundation, there are so many awesome opportunities to turn real-time data into communications tools that will be most effective for you and your projects.